Monday 19 January 2015

Teachable moments: a new strategy against waste








Dr. Benito Fontecha is a geriatrician and Twitter user, he is not too active on the network, but he is very selective and the other day had the good idea of writing a tweet alerting us of the appearance of a very interesting post on the JAMA Internal Medicine blog. This article, linked to by Dr. Fontecha, is signed by two medical editors of a commendable section of the magazine called: Teachable moments.

Now, let’s pay attention to the content of the aforementioned text because that's where I want to focus on. The point is that evidence-based medicine, in itself, has difficulty in achieving a reduction of overacting in clinical practice. For this reason, the authors explain that, although many people do not pay much attention to the chilling statistics of the 2001 report "To err is human" (remember that?) on deaths caused by medical errors, but someone came up with an analogy that ravaged the American public when he said that, the number of those that have died due to medical errors, equalled the number of deaths that would be caused if a commercial airliner full of passengers crashed every day, and as a result, clinical safety improving programs emerged worldwide.

With this example in mind, the authors are now asking the doctors to regain those ways of "Regarding a case..." so despised by the strength of the clinical trials. They say, if the evidence has limitations in reaching the doctor's office, give it a hand using the strength of real life histories, let’s go back to explain the patient’s clinical circumstances now focused on overdiagnosis and overtreatment, with the mastery of old professors. These stories, they believe, would help to illustrate the cold statistics of scientific articles and would reach beyond its current elitist limits.

And, as these two doctors, linked to JAMA Internal Medicine, want to lead by example, they have created "Teachable moments", a section full of promises.


Jordi Varela
Editor

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